Google's revealed it's working on extensions to its smartphone voice-control powers, debuted in the Nexus One, that'll automatically translate between languages.
Google's plans are to enhance the remote server-processed speech recognition systems in the Nexus One to include automatic, fast and accurate machine translation between languages, with a synthetic voice output. It's the stuff of pure utopian science fiction. But is it a good idea? The cultural impact could be absolutely shocking. For example, if Google's device succeeds, and is useful and ubiquitous (in other words, nearly everyone ends up using it, or a competing service)--nobody would need learn a foreign language. "Hooray!" you may be thinking, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. Because language plays such a fundamental part in connecting each of us as thinking creatures with the world around us, that the subtle nuances of language (which are different even in similar tongues, say the Latin-derived Spanish and Portuguese) actually shape how we think about the world.
